The Information Age is upon us. Access to vast quantities of information through a variety of different communication systems is changing the way people work, entertain themselves, and communicate with each other.
For example, because of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act, traditional cable television program providers have now evolved into full-service providers of advanced video, voice and data services for homes and businesses. A number of competing cable companies now offer cable systems that deliver all of the just-described services via a single broadband network.
These services have increased the need for bandwidth, which is the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. More bandwidth has become increasingly important, as the size of data transmissions has continually grown. Applications such as in-home movies-on-demand and video teleconferencing demand high data transmission rates. Another example is interactive video in homes and offices.
Other industries are also placing bandwidth demands on Internet service providers, and other data providers. For example, hospitals transmit images of X-rays and CAT scans to remotely located physicians. Such transmissions require significant bandwidth to transmit the large data files in a reasonable amount of time. These large data files, as well as the large data files that provide real-time home video are simply too large to be feasibly transmitted without an increase in system bandwidth. The need for more bandwidth is evidenced by user complaints of slow Internet access and dropped data links that are symptomatic of network overload.
In addition, the wireless device industry has recently seen unprecedented growth. With the growth of this industry, communication between different wireless devices, and the bandwidth of these devices, has become increasingly important. Conventional radio frequency (RF) technology has been the predominant technology for wireless device communication for decades.
Conventional RF technology employs continuous carrier sine waves that are transmitted with data embedded in the modulation of the sine waves' amplitude or frequency. For example, a conventional cellular phone must operate at a particular frequency band of a particular width in the total frequency spectrum. Specifically, in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has allocated cellular phone communications in the 800 to 900 MHz band. Generally, cellular phone operators divide the allocated band into 25 MHz portions, with selected portions transmitting cellular phone signals, and other portions receiving cellular phone signals.
Another type of inter-device communication technology is ultra-wideband (UWB). UWB wireless technology employs discrete pulses of electromagnetic energy and is fundamentally different from conventional carrier wave RF technology. UWB employs a “carrier free” architecture, which does not require the use of high frequency carrier generation hardware, carrier modulation hardware, frequency and phase discrimination hardware or other devices employed in conventional frequency domain communication systems.
One feature of UWB is that a UWB signal, or pulse, may occupy a very large amount of RF spectrum, for example, generally in the order of gigahertz of frequency band. Large amounts of data can be transmitted using UWB technology.
Developers of UWB communication devices have proposed different architectures, or communication methods for ultra-wideband devices. In one approach, the available RF spectrum is partitioned into discrete frequency bands. A UWB device may then transmit signals within one or more of these discrete sub-bands. Alternatively, a UWB communication device may occupy all, or substantially all, of the RF spectrum allocated for UWB communications. Regardless of what type of UWB architecture is employed, consumers will expect these devices to have a high bandwidth capability.
Therefore, there exists a need for methods to increase the bandwidth of wire and wireless networks.